Shawn Burns is Solve the Riddle

 MACQUARIE GROUP FH25—Top 10 position—waiting for the ROE lift. The following will not give an extensive group history, readers can look at past posts. Having said that I will give a brief recent background. General I think about MQG as a conglomerate of many businesses with the corporate function overseeing the critical roles of risk control and capital allocation. The past and future success of the group is dependent on the risk controls, the ability of the business units to identify, innovate, invest, grow, manage and often realise assets in a highly profitable manner, and the ability of the group to actively fund the growth businesses and cull the disappointments. The belief in management to continue this structure and its ongoing success is key to investing in MQG. Comments on results The overall result was Net Income up 4%, PBT up 15% and NPAT up 14%. These were adequate but not overly exciting results. ROE came in at 9.9%, around the cost of capital. Wh...

  C79—a speculative investment---changing gold assay sampling First, C79 is a speculative investment. Broadly, I define these as having a likely large dispersion of outcomes around my base case, which could include permanent capital loss. For this reason, the positions are below 1%, usually well below, and could be described as tracker positions. The story will become more certain as we get more data points, and if the SP remains attractive I will be willing to increase the position. That said my record in speculative investments is well below investing in the more mature record. The potential reasons for that I will leave to another post! Lol C79 (Chrysos Corporation) began as a CSIRO-funded venture to develop an alternative to fire assays that sample the attractiveness of gold deposits. The inventor, James Tickner is still with C79. The CSIRO involvement does give me some confidence that the technology has some substance. The company has moved on and listed in 2022. Th...

  Understandable business. Industry Overview The semiconductor industry players' businesses are incredibly interconnected, with each business within the industry playing a part in the whole. The complexity of individual parts, together with the need to coordinate the development of each activity, makes the chain a unique construct and interdependent. The chain comprises some important segments. The chain (put simply) is, designer software (CDNS, SNPS), chip designers, (AMD, NVDA), FAB operators (TSMC, Samsung, INTC which is integrated), and equipment suppliers that go into the FABs (ASML, KLAC, AMAT, ENTG, LRCX) and the end users, a large group comprising the likes of AAPL, the hyperscalers, consumer electronics and industrial uses. The industry requires an elevated level of cooperation between these players for strong and smooth growth with no bottlenecks emerging. Having said that the industry has a reasonable level of cyclicality driven by consumer electronics deman...